Weekly Roundup: Major Updates to PaaS

Over the last week the cloud world seemed to be showered with heaps of new offerings and releases from the cloud providers. There had been a few announcements and new feature release from Microsoft, Amazon, Cloudera and StackMob. Also, there was some good news for developers from Google, CloudFoundry and Hortonworks. Plus, HP Cloud showcased its new cloud migration service to the enterprises.

Here’s a quick summary of cloud happenings over the last week.

Beginning with the IaaS leader, Amazon has introduced a new High Memory Cluster Eight Extra Large instance for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Which is designed for memory-intensive applications, like in-memory analytics, databases, caching, and scientific computing. One of the new IaaS players, HP Cloud has showcased its Application Workload Migration services. They have presented a live demo on how quickly the Enterprise Applications can be migrated from a traditional data centre to the HP Public Cloud. Also, they have proved the efficiency by migrating a multi-tier web application from a dedicated server to the public cloud in just 12 minutes.

One of the major PaaS players, Windows Azure, has announced the general availability (GA) release of Windows Azure Media Services, which provides extremely scalable, end-to-end media solutions for streaming on-demand video to consumers on any device. There was another release of its new capability Notification Hubs that provides a highly scalable, cross-platform, push notification infrastructure that enables the developer to efficiently route push notification messages to millions of mobile users and devices. In addition, Azure introduced a new functionality SQL Server Native Backup functionality, which simplifies the backup and restore capability of an on-premises SQL Server database to Windows Azure. Furthermore, its final announcement of the week was about offering lots of new add-ons and data services at Windows Azure Store.

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Google has released code samples and tools for cloud services such as App Engine and BigQuery on the online repository GitHub. This is the first time that Google has moved away from code.google.com to github.com. Cloud Foundry has provided guidance on deploying and managing real-time applications on Cloud Foundry using common Node.js examples and Redis key-value store capabilities.

Some of the backend providers have also made some new releases. StackMob has released iOS SDK v.1.2.0 that enhances the performance of the SDK as well as a new interface for working with Core Data. This release also includes a caching system for fetching without needing to make network calls. ActiveState has announced about their support for Java 7. The latest Stackato release (2.6.7) includes Java 7 in its list of core runtimes, easily selectable at deploy time.

Cloudera, the Big Data platform provider has released the Cloudera Impala Beta (version 0.4) and Cloudera Manager 4.1.3 with some key enhancements. Hortonworks, another Big Data player has announced the availability of the Hortonworks Sandbox, easy-to-use, flexible and comprehensive learning environment that provides a rapid on-ramp to learn and explore enterprise Apache Hadoop.

Janakiram MSV heads the Cloud Infrastructure Services at Aditi Technologies. He was the founder and CTO of Get Cloud Ready Consulting, a niche Cloud Migration and Cloud Operations firm that recently got acquired by Aditi Technologies. In his current role, he leads a highly talented engineering team that focuses on migrating and managing applications deployed on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Windows Azure Infrastructure Services.
Janakiram is an industry analyst with deep understanding of Cloud services. Through his speaking, writing and analysis, he helps businesses take advantage of the emerging technologies. He leverages his experience of engaging with the industry in developing informative and practical research, analysis and authoritative content to inform, influence and guide decision makers. He analyzes market trends, new products / features, announcements, industry happenings and the impact of executive transitions.
Janakiram is one of the first few Microsoft Certified Professionals on Windows Azure in India. Demystifying The Cloud, an eBook authored by Janakiram is downloaded more than 100,000 times within the first few months. He is the Chief Editor of a popular portal on Cloud called www.CloudStory.in that covers the latest trends in Cloud Computing. Janakiram is an analyst with the GigaOM Pro analyst network where he analyzes the Cloud Services landscape. He is a guest faculty at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H) where he teaches Big Data and Cloud Computing to students enrolled for the Masters course. As a passionate speaker, he has chaired the Cloud Computing track at premier events in India.
He has been the keynote speaker at many premier conferences, and his seminars are attended by thousands of architects, developers and IT professionals. His sessions are rated among the best in every conference he participates.
Janakiram has worked at the world-class product companies including Microsoft Corporation, Amazon Web Services and Alcatel-Lucent. Joining as the first employee of Amazon Web Services in India, he was the AWS Technology Evangelist. Prior to that, Janakiram spent 10 years at Microsoft Corporation where he was involved in selling, marketing and evangelizing the Microsoft Application Platform and Tools.

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